Plot Details: This opinion reveals everything about the movie's plot.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 television film Martha is an exaggerated and hyper-stylized psychodrama featuring the emergence of a sadomasochistic marriage relationship. It is not particularly pleasant viewing but it is definitely thought-provoking and well-made.

My check-off of the “Good Date Movie” box for this film was tongue-in-cheek. Martha has to be about as bad a choice for a movie date as one could possibly select. I suppose that any guy looking for a creative way to break off a relationship could take his gal to this film and then comment with a straight face while leaving, “Now there’s the kind of marriage I’d like.”

Historical Background: Martha was originally made for German television in 1974. Consequently, it passed underneath the radar at the New York Film Festival which had helped previous Fassbinder films reach the American market. It was not until the DVD release of Martha in 2004 that it became widely available to American viewers. Fassbinder, who produced numerous films in his short life, is perhaps best known for The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978). The eccentric Fassbinder was a bisexual who typically dressed in a leather jacket. He was known for being something of a tyrant on his film sets. German cinema heated up in the 1970’s with the near simultaneous emergence of several young directors who collectively became known as the New German Cinema. Besides Fassbinder, this group included, notably, Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog.

The Story: Martha Heyer (Margit Carstensen) is a mid-twenty-ish virginal spinster and librarian, pretty in a demure kind of way, thin and porcelain-skinned. She is on vacation in Rome with her father (Adrian Hoven). He is a fastidious, punctual, domineering sort of man who refuses to be touched. At their first stop while touring the city, the Spanish Steps, the father is winded while climbing, refuses Martha’s offer to lean on her arm (saying, “You always want to touch me.”), then suffers a heart attack. As he lies dying in Martha’s arms, his last words are, “Please let go of me.” To add insult to injury, Martha soon discovers that her purse, containing all of her money, has been stolen in the confusion.

Martha calls home to report the news to her mother (Gisela Fackeldey) and it becomes obvious from Martha’s side of the phone conversation that her relationship with her mother is no better than that with her father. Martha's principal interest seems to be in conveying the fact that she’s having her first cigarette (which her father would not permit). As she prepares to leave Rome, Martha walks by a gentleman, Helmut Salomon (Karlheinz Böhm), who catches her eye – and she his. In fact, it seems for a moment that they are mutually mesmerized and about to collide, but the trance quickly subsides and they pass along their respective ways.

Back home, Martha turns down a proposal of marriage from her boss and fellow librarian (Wolfgang Schenck) citing her mother’s need for her. Martha visits her mother and tries to console her. The mother has turned to alcohol, tranquilizers and drawing mustaches on old photographs of her deceased husband. For her effort, Martha is told by her mother, “You’re a horrible old spinster. You revolt me.” At a formal dinner, a young man is introduced to the party and it turns out to be the man she had seen in Rome, Helmut Salomon. Embarrassed by a joke he makes aloud in front of the group about the meeting, she dashes from the room. Helmut follows closely, seemingly to console her. Their introductory conversation tells volumes about the man:

Helmut: I was struck by you in Rome. You had tears in your eyes.

Martha: Father had just died maybe a quarter of an hour before we met. Halfway up the Spanish step he . . .

Helmut: You aroused my feelings then.

Martha: I haven’t forgotten you since then either.

Helmut: I didn’t say I hadn’t forgotten you. [with a malicious kind of smile on his face]

Now, for any young ladies who might be reading this review, let me suggest that such a conversation should alert you to the dubious motivations of the young man, but if you’re still in doubt, consider what he adds a bit later in the same conversation: “I don’t think you’re very beautiful and certainly not attractive and charming. You’re too thin, almost skinny. When one looks at you one can almost feel your bones. And I have the impression your body smells.”

Martha laughs. Now, maybe I’ve been missing out on something, ladies and gentlemen, and correct me if I’m wrong, but I hadn’t known that kind of approach to work as a pickup line! There seems to be something rather abnormal developing here in this relationship.

Martha and Helmut begin to see one another. He takes her to an amusement park and insists that they take a ride together on the roller coaster, despite Martha being terrified of the idea. “Fear is something to be overcome,” he insists. We see them on the ride, she utterly terrified and nauseated and he as gleeful as any little boy – all the more when he notes her horrified look. After the ride, she vomits and he proposes marriage! And from there, it’s all downhill!

Once they are married, Helmut proves to be both sadistic and domineering. His sadism takes the form of bites on her neck and shoulders and his becoming aroused whenever she is in emotional or physical pain. During their honeymoon, she gets sunburned to the point that all touch is painful. Needless to say, his ardor is aroused and he's all over her. Whenever she cries for any reason, he immediately wants to have sex (I started to type “make love,” but that hardly seems appropriate). But it gets worse!

Worse than his perverse sadistic tendencies is his need to dominate her completely. He tells her in no uncertain terms that she is never to refuse him when he wants sex. He rents a new house (with no prior discussion) and insists that they move out of her childhood home so that they can start anew. He insists that her taste in music (Donizetti: Lucia di Lammermoor) is trash and that from now on she will listen instead to Orlando di Lasso. He assigns her a book to read pertaining to the Engineering of Dams – which is his profession – so that she will be able to discuss his work. But it gets worse! He turns in her resignation at the library – without so much as telling her his intention to do so and, obviously, without her concurrence. She shows up for work and is humiliated to learn she no longer has a job. He has the phone disconnected at their new home. He asks her (ever so politely) – as a special favor to him – if she will promise him never to go out of the house while he is gone during the week, so that he can be confident that she is being faithful and that there will be no possibility of temptation. When their respective recollections of some point of prior discussion differs, he insists that she concede that it is her recollection that is in error. She is a naturally compliant kind of person and tries to please him, but his demands are beyond all reason. When she tries to please him with some spontaneous gesture of giving, such as his favorite dinner or a new hairdo, she is ridiculed for her foolishness.

Martha reaches out tentatively for guidance from others. She meets with a friend and tries to explain, searching for alternative words to describe Helmut’s behavior, then denying them: “Violent. No, not violent, exactly.” “Severe.” Her friend can only offer, optimistically, “Just you wait and see. Someday, he’ll seem very ordinary to you.” Herr Kaiser (Peter Chatel), who she had trained at the library, offers to help her. She initially rejects his offer, not wanting to have to acknowledge the depth of the depravity of her marriage. Later, when her desperation increases, she seeks his help but, by then, her distress is too shocking for him to bear with equanimity. He flees.

Martha finds Helmut waiting at home for her and he announces that he has a present for her in the bedroom. She interprets this as his intending to kill her. She races out and runs away, ultimately ending up at Herr Kaiser’s door. He agrees to take her for a ride. She has become so paranoid, now, that she imagines that the car behind them is Helmut in pursuit. She grabs the wheel of the vehicle that she and Kaiser are in, causing the car to careen off the road.

Martha wakes up in the hospital and soon learns that Kaiser died in the accident and that she herself will be paralyzed for life in her lower body. She is told not to worry, however. Helmut is not the kind of man to abandon her in need.

Themes: To understand the theme of Martha, it is necessary to understand Fassbinder’s frame of mind. He was a very distraught individual who ultimately committed suicide in 1982. Fassbinder himself was more than pleased to acknowledge his pitiably despondent nature. His lead actress, Margit Carstensen once said to him, “You really are a wretched person,” to which he responded, “That’s what I’ve been saying all along.” Fassbinder despised the German bourgeoisie, which he viewed as only concerned with making money and keeping up appearances, but totally lacking in positive human emotions. His own childhood had been, using Martha’s word, “severe.” So, what Fassbinder is expressing in Martha is his contempt for the domineering and sadistic patriarchal German society with its deficiency of positive human emotions. That may sound strong but consider that this is Fassbinder.

According to the disk liner notes by Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Fassbinder consciously based the portrayal of Helmut Salomon on his own father, and even dressed like his father in conservative neckties, shirts, and suits throughout the film’s production.” According to actor Karlheinz Böhm, who played Helmut Salomon, Fassbinder believed that a concept had to be exaggerated in order to reveal its full force and to unleash its full artistic effect. If there is a shortcoming in the works of Fassbinder, it is that he was far more skillful at recognizing the emotional corruption and coldness of the German bourgeois mentality than in portraying how that deficiency could be addressed.

I have to say that I am somewhat frustrated by psychodrama that is not bound by the conditions of realism – by psychological realism, that is. Part of the appeal of psychodrama for me is the enjoyment of analyzing the motivations of the characters and causal influences. That pursuit becomes trivial when the characters lack evident psychological foundation or consistency. We're given no idea as to why Helmut is so sadistic or why Martha is so willing to be abused. Perhaps they are the way they are because of how they were brought up by their respective parents. Martha, for example, may have acquired the “habit” of submitting to domination – in her relationships with her father and her mother. We're just not provided with any way of really knowing.

According to the liner notes, a hotly debated issue in relation to this film is the question of the extent to which Martha’s ultimate virtual enslavement coincided with her own inner nature and will. Fassbinder, for example, claims that, in the end, Martha “has finally gotten what she wanted all along.” Carstensen, the actress who played Martha, disagrees, saying “I really think that this is a resignation on her part.” My view is that the distinction is less important than it seems. I am not as enamored as are many other people in our society with the notion that exploitive relationships are acceptable if the victim is complicit in some sense in their own exploitation. Con artists, for example, convince themselves that they are doing the victim a favor by “teaching them a lesson” or because they are separating a fool or greedy person from their belongings. Tobacco companies emphasize the voluntary nature of smoking while increasing the addictive capacity of their products with additives and glamorizing smoking through their advertisements aimed mostly at adolescents. If (to extend the concept to its logical extreme in the manner of Fassbinder) a person, entirely under free volition, offered to sign a contract to become my slave for life, it would still be a morally reprehensible relationship, were I to accept. Whether or not a person has the right to voluntarily choose to be victimized does not alter in the slightest that it is morally wrong to be a victimizer. A masochist is a psychologically disturbed individual but a sadist is morally corrupt. All claims by the exploitive elements of our society to the contrary are pure rationalization.

Production Values: Martha is such a relentlessly intense film that one is hardly able to take note of the extraordinary cinematography. Fassbinder had more than his usual budget for the making of Martha and took full advantage of that to incorporate some creative visual effects. There’s a neat circular pan, for example, when Martha and Helmut first cross paths in Rome. There’s a lovely shot of Martha strolling with the fog over the river in the background.

The highlight of the film is the performance by Margit Carstensen. The character may not be admirable but the performance certainly is. Carstensen elicits our full sympathy with the depth of portrayal that she brings to the part. She is not today’s strong woman ideal, but she is a very decent and sensitive sort of person. Karl-Heinz Böhm was disturbingly sinister as the sly-smiling sadist. He also appeared in the Fassbinder film Effi Briest (1974) and in Peeping Tom (1960).

Bottom-Line: Martha is a potent domestic thriller and psychodrama that will hold your attention, though unlikely to elicit feelings of enjoyment. It is about a very disturbed marital relationship. Fassbinder intends that relationship to be a reflection on German bourgeois society. I recommend this film only for those with a taste for psychodrama emphasizing psychopathologic relationships. It’s a well-made film with a brilliant performance by the lead actress. Martha is in German with optional English subtitles. The DVD provides a high quality transfer but no extras. The film has a running time of 115 minutes.

Recommended: Yes

Video Occasion: Good Date Movie
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age